The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg on How to Report From Guantanamo Bay

The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg has reported from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay since the first detainee arrived in 2002. Last month, President Obama scuttled the office responsible for closing the center, which means Gitmo’s “media tent city” will be a permanent press encampment for the foreseeable future. Petra Bartosiewicz spoke with the veteran correspondent by phone from Gitmo’s Camp Justice, where Rosenberg has been covering pretrial hearings this month of the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid SheikhMohammed.

When he took office, President Obama promised to close Guantanamo within a year. Now the office dedicated to closing the detention center has itself been closed. What’s going on? There are 166 detainees here right now. Congress has incrementally imposed harder and harder restrictions on their resettlement. Last year, two detainees went to El Salvador and two left dead. Nobody wants to be the person who sent someone back who will be behind the next terror attack. So it’s Guantanamoforever.

How many times have you been to Guantanamo? I’d say I’ve averaged about a week a month over the past eleven years. My longest stay was 41 nights. To get here you have to fly to D.C. You show up at a golf course near Andrews Air Force Base at about five in the morning and then get on a plane to Guantanamo with the judge, the defense attorneys, the prosecutors, and the media. It’s the war court on a plane, everyone but thedefendants.

What are the conditions for reporters like? When we first came down here, we were put up in guest housing that was like a bad Motel Six. Now we live in tents. Each tent has six little plywood-surrounded compartments with a twin bed, bureau, a light bulb on a pull chain, and a massive generator-run ventilation system that pushes very cold air through. We were told you have to keep it at least 70 degrees to keep the rodents out. There’s a creature down here called a Banana Rat, which looks like a possum. It’s aproblem.

Do you feel you’ve made any inroads as a reporter? Soldiers come and go on six- to twelve- month to two-year rotations here and every time a rotation comes through, you have to fight the same battles in terms of your ability to function.* The photos you took yesterday may be considered a national security violation by the next rotation. I should say though that this is a very liberal moment at Guantanamo. Until recently, we had a 10 p.m.curfew.

When you say liberal moment, what do you mean? It used to be if you referred to the prisoners they’d say ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, we don’t have any prisoners here,’ and until you referred to them as detainees they wouldn’t acknowledge thequestion.

Are reporters being monitored less now? Well, there are two soldiers in the room with me right now, and there’s a red sticker on my phone that says, ‘This telephone is subject to monitoring at all times, use of this phone constitutes consent to monitoring.’ I think being on this island basically constitutes consent to beingmonitored.

Speaking of the island, do you ever take a break and go for a swim? I haven’t done that for years. There was a time when the military was offering beach opportunities to the media. They were like, let’s have a picnic, let’s have a barbecue, let’s go on a boat trip. In my opinion it was to distract us from reporting. I’m here to report. I’ve never been on the sailboat, and I’ve never been on the golf course. I have been to the bowlingalley.

The Defense Department spokesman, Jeffrey Gordon, brought a sexual harassment case against you in 2009, accusing you, according to the complaint, of saying to him, “Have you ever had a red hot poker shoved up your ass? Have you ever had a broomstick shoved up your ass? Have you ever had anything shoved up your ass? Have you ever had anything in your ass? How would you know how it feels if it never happened to you? Admit it, you liked it. No wonder you like to stay in South Beach on your Miami visits.” Does any of this sound familiar? I’m not going to comment on that. There’s nothing I can say that doesn’t make it more prurient. It was a terrible episode. All I’m going to say is he was removed from his job. I keptmine.

How has covering the detention center changed? When we first came down in 2002 a couple days before prisoners came, there was a real sense that this was an important moment in history and the military wanted coverage. They wanted reporters to report on it. They were really proud of what they were doing here. It was definitely a place where reporters were being brought in 40 a week to talk to commanders. Now, if you’re not here for a trial they bring in maybe four amonth.

What have you not seen that you want to see? I want to see Camp 7. That’s where they keep the sixteen men who were kept by CIA in the dark sites. The camp’s existence came up in a briefing by mistake, and no one has ever told me who built it, how much they paid for it, or who the contractor was. They take us here year after year and they call it safe, legal, humane, and transparent detention, and they systematically keep us out of a place that holds the people who were held in dark sites. I’m not saying to them “I want to go in and interview Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.” But you have to ask who is running it and why it has to be such asecret.

Gitmo has always been such a study in contradictions: It was chosen as a kind of legal black hole where due process requirements could be avoided, yet it has been presented as a place where the detainees are getting a fair hearing through the military commissions — It was chosen because it was lawless, outside the bounds of the law. But it’s a lawless place where if you’re going more than 35 miles an hour you’ll be stopped by a navy cop and writtenup.

You’ve been giving a play-by-play of the hearings on Twitter. This court was built out of the reach of the American public. And out of the reach of most American media. That’s why I do a Twitter feed. People want moreinsight.

I notice you tweeted that Zero Dark Thirty is playing in a couple months at the base movie theater. I think people don’t realize what a community there is around here. The base has a full-time population of around 6,000.* A third [of the people here] are Defense Department contractors, largely Jamaican and Filipino laborers, another third are related to the detention center, guards, cooks, and intelligence analysts. The rest of the base is like a giant gas station in the Caribbean. The Coast Guard and Navy come in for refueling stops and use the base for supplies and the bars. It’s like a small town with a prison. There are suburban neighborhoods here with schools and playgrounds and there’s a McDonalds and a church, and an outdoor movie theater. Since the detention center was built, the quality of the movies has reallyimproved.

Weirdest thing you’ve stumbled across? I once ended up at the detainee library where I discovered that the Fresh Prince of Bel Air was the rage among the detainees. They were ordering more copies of theseries.

How long do you think you’ll continue covering Guantanamo? There are people who call the War on Terror the “forever war”; if this is the forever war, then this is the forever prison. I want to stay here for the 9/11 trial, which I think is years away. I feel like I have an institutional knowledge. Everyone else rotates in and out of here. The soldiers come and go, the lawyers come and go, most of the reporters come and go. I feel a responsibility to stay. I want to see how it ends. I’m a little concerned it’s never goingto.

*This article has been updated since its original publication. It has been corrected to show that the base’s full-time population is 6,000, not 8,000, that the population of laborers is Jamaican and Filipino, and that soldiers come through on rotations of up to two years.

*A condensed version of this article appears in the March 4, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

The nation’s top intelligence official is illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint, possibly to protect President Donald Trump or senior White House officials, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff alleged Friday.

Schiff issued a subpoena for the complaint, accusing acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire of taking extraordinary steps to withhold the complaint from Congress, even after the intel community’s inspector general characterized the complaint as credible and of “urgent concern.”

“A Director of National Intelligence has never prevented a properly submitted whistleblower complaint that the [inspector general] determined to be credible and urgent from being provided to the congressional intelligence committees. Never,” Schiff said in a statement. “This raises serious concerns about whether White House, Department of Justice or other executive branch officials are trying to prevent a legitimate whistleblower complaint from reaching its intended recipient, the Congress, in order to cover up serious misconduct.”

Schiff indicated that he learned the matter involved “potentially privileged communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community,” raising the specter that it is “being withheld to protect the President or other Administration officials.”

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group on Saturday attacked two plants at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including the world’s biggest petroleum processing facility, in a strike that three sources said had disrupted output and exports.

Two sources close to the matter said 5 million barrels per day of crude production had been impacted — close to half of the kingdom’s output or 5% of global oil supply.

The pre-dawn drone attack on the Saudi Aramco facilities set off several fires, although the kingdom, the world’s largest oil exporter, later said these were brought under control.

Candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination are sprinting from coast to coast in search of campaign donations over the next 18 days, moving urgently to stockpile cash for their big fall push — and to avoid a death spiral that a weak third-quarter fundraising tally might prompt. …

Still, Democratic donors have expressed nervousness in recent weeks that some presidential hopefuls could post disappointing totals, compounding the candidates’ broader struggles. July and August tend to be slow for fundraising, with many people on vacation and tuned out of politics. The large and unpredictably fluid field also has made it difficult for donors to commit to a candidate.

“The third quarter number, from a finance standpoint, will define the narrative throughout the course of the fall, when these questions about viability for so many of the candidates are so real, especially in the second and third tiers,” said Rufus Gifford, the finance director for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaignand a donor to at least three candidates so far this year.

While MIT engages in damage control following revelations the university’s Media Lab accepted millions of dollars in funding from Jeffrey Epstein, a renowned computer scientist at the university has fanned the flames by apparently going out of his way to defend the accused sex trafficker—and child pornography in general.

Richard Stallman has been hailed as one of the most influential computer scientists around today and honored with a slew of awards and honorary doctorates, but his eminence in the academic computer science community came into question Friday afternoon when purportedly leaked email excerpts showed him suggesting one of Epstein’s alleged victims was “entirely willing.”

An MIT engineering alumna, Selam Jie Gano, published a blog post calling for Stallman’s removal from the university in light of his comments, along with excerpts from the email in which Stallman appeared to defend both Epstein and Marvin Minsky, a lauded cognitive scientist and founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab who was accused of assaulting Virginia Giuffre.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young liberal icon from New York, has endorsed Senator Ed Markey’s reelection bid next year, as Representative Joe Kennedy III considers challenging Markey for what promises to be the nation’s most competitive congressional primary.

Ocasio-Cortez and Markey have worked together as the primary sponsors of the Green New Deal, the signature legislative issue for both lawmakers.

ABC’s coverage of the 10-candidate forum draws the largest preliminary ratings for any debate so far this cycle.

ABC and Univision scored strong ratings Thursday with their coverage of the third Democratic presidential primary debate.

The debate, featuring 10 candidates and current frontrunners Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren sharing the stage for the first time, drew a 10.0 household rating in Nielsen’s 56 metered markets. That’s 23 percent higher than the 8.1 NBC got for part two of the first debate on June 27, but about 25 percent lower than combined metered-market average for NBC and MSNBC. That telecast ended up with 18.1 million viewers across NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo.

Beginning speech to Concerned Women of America, @SecPompeo says “this is such a beautiful hotel. The guy who owns it must gonna be successful along the way,” he says, without mentioning @realDonaldTrump by name. “That was for the Washington Post,” he says of his remark. pic.twitter.com/vPYp9vYE9y

Child care, a key issue for many Americans, is getting little attention at the debates

Millions of Americans struggle to find decent, affordable child care every year. But when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tried to bring up the subject during Thursday’s Democratic debate, in response to a question about education, a moderator cut her off.

“Start with our babies by providing universal child care for every baby age 0 to 5, universal pre-K for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old in this country,” Warren said, just getting on a roll when ABC moderator Linsey Davis interrupted. “Thank you, senator,” Davis said.

Davis was just following the rules: Warren’s time for the response had lapsed. But the moment was a perfect metaphor for the attention child care and other work-family issues have gotten in these debates ― or, more accurately, the attention they have not gotten in these debates.

After the debate, Castro is being criticized for his kamikaze attack on Biden, while journalists are toiling away trying to transcribe Biden’s “record player” response

Biden was asked whether he still held these attitudes: “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?” What follows is a transcript of his rambling answer (I have omitted nothing), which for some reason includes references to record players and Venezuela:

Well, they have to deal with the — look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. From the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose is we take the very poor schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level.

Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3, 4 and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school.

Social workers help parents deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know what to play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there.